Exactly 12 years ago on the eve of the new millennium, when together with a small team of youngsters I embarked upon the mission to launch EducationWorld as the country’s first education news and analysis magazine, the expectation was of a smooth journey ahead. There was undoubtedly a general consensus in society — especially within the country’s 250-300 million-strong middle class — that high-quality school and collegiate education is as important for dignified survival as food, shelter and clothing. Yet the fair weather which promised smooth sailing proved deceptive.
Actually, it was a shock to discover that art for art’s sake or love of learning for its own sake has disappeared from the new society shaped by post-independence India’s shallow politicians and control-and-command bureaucrats, who took it upon themselves to shape a “socialistic pattern of society”. For the overwhelming majority of the country’s over-hyped middle class, education is a means to an end — whether passing examinations or acquiring professional qualifications — permitting entry into Ali Baba’s cave of goods and services. The broad spirit of enquiry, experimentation and innovation, which produces inventions and new systems and processes which benefit society, has vanished from Indian academia. Nor is there any discernible interest within the rising middle class, which has the option of private K-12 and higher education, in improving the country’s dysfunctional public education system gone from bad to worse.
The outcome of this combination of factors is that for most of the past dozen years, EducationWorld, whose raison d’etre is to broadcast and debate ways and means to raise education standards across the board, particularly in public education, has been confronted with a steep mountain of middle class indifference and inertia. Only recently after more than a decade of experiencing the full brunt of the insolence of office, proud man’s contumely, spurns of the unworthy etc, has this publication broken even and is sailing in calm waters. And while it’s been a stormy and eventful passage through rough seas, we have the satisfaction of believing that EW has played a lead role in moving the subject of education from the periphery of national consciousness towards centre.
Yet even as we have been continuously preaching the virtues of QEFA (quality education for all), doing so has also been a learning experience. And one lesson learned is that the public education system has been so gravely neglected and abused for the past six decades after independence, especially by state governments, that it offers little hope of reform. What has also come to light is that quietly and unobtrusively, the burden of educating the middle class and the general public has devolved upon — and is being shouldered by — private educationists and entrepreneurs driven by enlightened self-interest.
This 12th Anniversary issue of EducationWorld highlights the socially beneficial contributions of some of the country’s many — and may their tribe increase — edupreneurs in preschool, K-12, vocational, higher education as well as NGOs and corporates who have run the gauntlet of the ubiquitous licence-permit-quota regime, to maintain the inflow of trained and skilled youth into Indian industry and services. By the force of their example, they also offer hope of reform within the public education system, the prerequisite of social equity and national development.
